Deride the lightning: assessing The Birth of a Nation 100 years on

DW Griffith’s landmark film was one of the most influential in early cinema, but as well as sophisticated cinematic techniques it was also drenched in racism. In the week of its centenary screening, Ashley Clark reassesses its standing

DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation – which premiered in New York 100 years ago this week – has a just reputation as one of cinema’s greatest problem pictures. Based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, it chronicles the relationship of two families in Civil War- and Reconstruction-era America over several years. It is undeniably a technically astounding achievement: critics have long praised its editing techniques, shot composition and epic sense of scale, while its pioneering aesthetic qualities are taught in schools and universities worldwide.

But – and it is a big but – The Birth of a Nation also happens to be an egregiously racist piece of work. It is the key film that helped to calcify a set of enduring negative stereotypes of black people on screen: from the feckless, incompetent gadabout to the sexually ravenous buck obsessed with debasing pristine white womanhood. It gleefully recasts the Reconstruction period as a time of terror, with blacked-up white actors playing a barbaric militia (supported by the conquering white northerners) preying on terrified southern whites.

In one of its most infamous scenes, black men are depicted eating fried chicken and swigging booze on the floor of the South Carolina state house. The Ku Klux Klan, conversely, are portrayed as glorious heroes. In its galling conclusion, the protagonists don hoods and lynch the blackface character Gus after he has attempted to rape a white woman. The film’s technical slickness and pulsating energy work in tandem with its repulsive ideology to create a uniquely unsettling viewing experience.

As a telling signifier of cinema’s cultural impact, even in its earliest days, The Birth of a Nation prompted a huge upsurge in Ku Klux Klan membership; it was used as an effective recruitment tool up until the 1970s, when then-leader David Duke would screen it in meetings, and add his own narration. It also boasts the dubious distinction of being the first-ever film to be screened at the White House. President Woodrow Wilson – who had a famously poor record on race – enthusiastically endorsed it. He is quoted as saying of the film: “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

As well as having a negative impact on American race relations, The Birth of a Nation also had a harmful effect on attempts to foster progressive images of black people in cinema. Ron Magliozzi, co-curator of the revelatory current MoMA exhibition 100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History, argues that it was instrumental in keeping the film at the heart of his exhibition – a sweet-natured, all-black-cast romantic comedy from 1913 starring vaudevillian Bert Williams – from ever being released.

“I believe Birthchanged everything. The film [in our exhibition] was trying to compete in the market of what comedy films looked like in the period, and to highlight how good the performances were,” he said. Instead, only the films which featured Williams in stereotyped “coon” roles saw the light of day. “The film they didn’t release wasn’t racist enough; the films they did release [Fish and Natural Born Gambler, both in 1916] were,” he lamented.

The Ku Klux Klan used the movie as a recruitment tool up until the 1970s. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

African Americans, however, were unprepared to take this assault on their dignity lying down. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909, attempted to mount a boycott of Griffith’s film, albeit with limited success (they made little headway with white exhibitors). Appeals to white conscience were soon replaced by demands for censorship, although these too largely ran aground, save for a few minor cuts made to prints screened in a handful of states. In a passionate letter dated 17 April 1915, the NAACP national secretary, Mary Childs Nerney, described the organisation’s frustrated efforts to get local censors to remove particularly objectionable scenes: “I am utterly disgusted with the situation in regard to The Birth of a Nation … The harm it is doing the colored people cannot be estimated.”

The most notable early protests came in Boston, and were largely down to the efforts of one man: William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian, and an activist once considered nearly as influential as Booker T Washington and WEB Du Bois. Monroe had form: he once successfully blocked a stage version of Dixon’s book from being performed, and he boldly led a charge against Birth in the form of editorials, speeches and rallies at city hall.

According to Dick Lehr’s 2014 book The Birth of a Nation, Trotter arrived one night at Boston’s Tremont Theatre with intentions to disrupt the screenings – his presence prompted crowds outside to swell to 2,000 people. Monroe was subsequently arrested. Unfortunately – and as is perennially the case when outrage is attached to a cultural product – the noise effectively promoted the work. “It is undoubtedly true that the agitation carried on by our organization and individuals have helped to advertise Dixon’s wretched film play,” read a June 1915 editorial in the African American newspaper Crisis.

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Despite limited gains, the scale of the response ultimately extended beyond America. “The protests spread to Canada, the Canal Zone, and would even reach places like France,” says Cara Caddoo, author of Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life. “[The protests] were not just a response of black Americans and black people from the diaspora to this film, they also represented a movement toward reclaiming something that they had been shut out of in the first place.” Here, Caddoo refers to the little-known fact that long before the rise of Hollywood, black creatives including the likes of Harry A Royston and William G Hynes had been producing their own films independently.

These film-makers’ influence can be traced in the work of the most prominent black director of the period: Illinois-born Oscar Micheaux, who founded the Micheaux Film and Book Company of Sioux City, in Chicago. His first project was a production of his own novel, The Homesteader, as a feature in 1919. His follow-up, Within Our Gates (1920), was an impassioned riposte to Griffith’s twisted vision. Within a slim running time of 79 minutes, the film manages to sensitively tackle the hardships of blacks in Jim Crow-era America; the promises and disappointments of black freedom; and the emergence of the “New Negro” (a term coined by Harlem poet Alain Locke to connote more confident, politically active black Americans).

Within Our Gates also portrays racially motivated white violence with an appropriate level of horror. Yet, despite its nuanced view of black family life and insightful take on race relations, Micheaux’s film – unlike Griffith’s – has failed to establish itself as a core text on national syllabi, suggesting that cinema pedagogy has prioritised aesthetic appreciation over tackling tricky sociological issues. Availability may also be a factor: Within Our Gates was considered a “lost” film until a copy was discovered in the Spanish Film Archive in Madrid in 1990.

Spike Lee wrote and directed a 20-minute film called The Answer, about a rewrite of The Birth of a Nation by a black screenwriter, while at NYU. Photograph: Lou Rocco/Getty Images

Hollywood’s depiction of African Americans in the decades following The Birth of a Nation, despite some developments, can be fairly concisely boiled down to the title of the classic book by historian Donald Bogle: Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks. Griffith’s film gnawed at a new generation of film-makers, among them Spike Lee. For one of his first-year projects in 1980, Lee wrote and directed a 20-minute film called The Answer, about an out-of-work black screenwriter who agrees to write a remake of The Birth of a Nation.

The Answer incensed some NYU faculty members, who recommended Lee’s expulsion from the programme. Lee was ultimately allowed to remain, but the response of even the more supportive staff betrayed a level of discomfort – a sense of irritation at a young artist contradicting the canon.

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Eleanor Hamerow, former head of the department, told the Guardian in 2009: “He was trying to solve a problem overnight – the social problem with the blacks and the whites. He undertook to fix the great film-maker who made that movie, DW Griffith.” Lee returned to The Birth of a Nation in his minstrel satire Bamboozled (2000), including the courthouse clip in a devastating closing montage.

Other film-makers have engaged critically with The Birth of a Nation. In 2004, Paul D Miller, also known as DJ Spooky, audio-visually remixed the film as Rebirth of a Nation. Miller loops and splices its most offensive moments to create an hypnotic alternate version which challenges notions of revisionist history and relates Griffith’s film to contemporary America. In Justin Simien’s recent satire Dear White People, one of the central characters, Sam (Tessa Thompson), takes a page from Spike Lee’s book and screens her short film The Rebirth of a Nation. It features white people in whiteface berating Barack Obama, and it frightens her classmates into silence.

If The Birth of a Nation is as Xan Brooks described it – “cinema’s toxic tide-pool, its corrupted semen” – then recent developments such as the release of Selma (incidentally the most recent film to screen at the White House) are helping to wipe up the mess. Yet stereotypes forged in the crucible of Griffith’s film remain in play, and the Hollywood playing field is far from level regarding diversity. Until such inequalities are erased, The Birth of a Nation will remain a spiky, forbidding and disconcertingly compelling obelisk planted squarely in the centre of the cultural landscape.